Catching up with Straight No Chaser before Beaver Creek performance
Last Word Features
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The 2024 touring year for Straight No Chaser figures to give the nine-member a cappella group — as well as their fans — plenty of musical variety.
The group kicked things off with a recently completed tour of the Northeastern United States and Canada in which they brought back last year’s summer yacht rock-themed show. In October, Straight No Chaser will begin their annual tour featuring songs from their deep catalog of Christmas songs.
Sandwiched between those tours is Straight No Chaser’s Summer: The 90s tour, which will spotlight songs from that decade. To singer Walter Chase, this outing, which runs from July into mid-August, represents a full-circle moment for the group.
“We started in 1996 at Indiana University, he said in an early July phone interview. “So there aren’t a lot of founding members (still) in the group. I’m one of them, but the founding members lived the ’90s. That was our college years and when the group started out. So a lot of the songs that we were listening to, the reason why we wanted to instead of just singing in our choir — we were in a 120-person show choir called the Singing Hoosiers that 10 of us broke off (from to form Straight No Chaser) — we wanted to sing Boyz II Men. We wanted to sing the songs that we were listening to. That was sort of the genesis of the group.”
When the original members graduated, they moved on to various career pursuits, never expecting that Straight No Chaser would be a part of their lives again.
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The unlikely return of the a cappella group stemmed from a 10th anniversary reunion of the original collegiate group in 2006. To generate enthusiasm for the occasion, bass singer Randy Stine made DVDs of a 1998 Straight No Chaser concert and posted a performance of the group’s wacky rendition of “The 12 Days of Christmas” to You Tube.
The clip of “The 12 Days of Christmas” went viral and became 2007’s most viewed video. It caught the attention of Craig Kallman, the chairman and CEO of Atlantic Records, who tracked down Stine and offered the group a record deal.
Eight of the 10 original members returned, while two singers that were part of later editions of Straight No Chaser at Indiana University filled out the lineup. Several singers have left the group over the years, each replaced by members of later lineups at Indiana. Today’s lineup has nine members: Chase, Seggie Isho, Steve Morgan, Tyler Trepp, Jerome Collins, Michael Luginbill, Jasper Smith, Freedom Young and Luke Bob Robinson (who recently replaced Stine).
Thinking Christmas music was the perfect introduction to the group, Kallman and Atlantic Records had the group debut with the 2008 Christmas album, “Holiday Spirits.” It was an immediate hit. Since then, the group has released four more holiday albums, six full-length albums and four EPs.
Along the way, Straight No Chaser’s fall holiday tours have become the bread and butter of the group’s touring year, drawing multiple generations of families that have made seeing the shows part of their holiday traditions.
During the spring and summers, Straight No Chaser have played shows that highlighted their non-holiday material. Last year’s yacht rock tour marked the start of an ongoing strategy to differentiate the spring/summer tours from the holiday outings and let fans know they will see two totally different shows if they come out for both tours.
Chase said while the group hopes to do another yacht rock tour in the not-distant future, but the group decided to pivot to the ’90s theme for this summer. Songs from that decade have always populated Straight No Chaser’s albums and Chase said fans have been asking for some time for the group to do a ’90s themed tour. Considering ’90s music is currently enjoying a resurgence, the timing for the Summer: The 90s tour makes sense.
To accompany the Summer: The 90s tour, the group has released an EP, “90s Proof,” which features seven songs from that decade. Some of the songs the group covers on the EP include “Life is a Highway” (the Tom Cochrane song made famous by Rascal Flatts), Santana’s “Maria Maria,” Lisa Loeb’s “Stay” and the Cranberries’ “Linger.”
“We wanted to find a mix of tunes that would not only sound great on an album, but would translate to a live audience as well,” Chase said.
Chase said this summer’s show will cover a wide range of music from the 1990s.
“We’ve made it so that it covers a little bit everything from rock to R&B to even, you know, the teen pop stuff of the Spice Girls and Hanson, even Ricky Martin,” Chase said, adding this summer’s show also includes rock tunes by the likes of Oasis and Weezer, a medley of songs by female singers and another medley of ’90s television show theme songs.
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